In this paper, we demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are due to changes in the age structure. To this end, we use administrative data on earnings for every male Norwegian during 1967-2000. We find that the substantial...

The paper uses a veil of ignorance approach and income distribution data of developed countries to arrive at inequality corrected income rankings. While a risk neutral individual (based on year 2000 data) would have preferred to be born into the US rather than any European country in our sample...

Income inequality in Germany has been continuously increasing during the past 20 years. In general, this is understood as an increase in inequality of wages due to changes in bargaining power of employees. However, the role of changing household structure is widely neglected. Societal trends...

This paper analyzes the evolution of tax progressivity in Sweden from both annual and lifetime perspectives. Using a rich micro panel with administrative records of incomes, taxes and benefits over the period 1968–2009, we calculate tax rates across the income distribution accounting for...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...

Empirically analyzing household behavior usually relies on informal data preprocessing. That is, before an econometric model is estimated, observations are selected in such a way that the resulting subset of data can be assumed to be sufficiently homogeneous with respect to the specific research...

This paper suggests how to quantify asymmetries in volatility spillovers that emerge due to bad and good volatility. Using data covering most liquid U.S. stocks in seven sectors, we provide ample evidence of the asymmetric connectedness of stocks at the disaggregate level. Moreover, the...

This paper proposes tests of policy ineffectiveness in the context of macroeconometric rational expectations models. It is assumed that there is a policy intervention that takes the form of changes in the parameters of a policy rule, and that there are sufficient observations before and after...

The theoretical literature on the economics of fiscal federalism has identified several potential effects of government decentralization on economic growth. Much of the traditional literature focuses on the efficiency aspects of a decentralized provision of public services. However,...

We examine the largest cost component in offshore development projects, drilling rates, which have been high in recent years. To our knowledge, rig rates have not been analysed empirically before in the economic literature. Using econometric analysis, we examine the effects of gas and oil...